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ABSTRACT: Background
Why is it that certain violent criminals repeatedly find themselves engaged in brawls? Many inmates report having felt provoked or threatened by their victims, which might be due to a tendency to ascribe malicious intentions when faced with ambiguous social signals, termed hostile attribution bias.Methods
The present study presented morphed fear-anger faces to prison inmates with a history of violent crimes, a history of child sexual abuse, and to matched controls form the general population. Participants performed a fear-anger decision task. Analyses compared both response frequencies and measures derived from psychophysical functions fitted to the data. In addition, a test to distinguish basic facial expressions and questionnaires for aggression, psychopathy and personality disorders were administered.Results
Violent offenders present with a reliable hostile attribution bias, in that they rate ambiguous fear-anger expressions as more angry, compared to both the control population and perpetrators of child sexual abuse. Psychometric functions show a lowered threshold to detect anger in violent offenders compared to the general population. This effect is especially pronounced for male faces, correlates with self-reported aggression and presents in absence of a general emotion recognition impairment.Conclusions
The results indicate that a hostile attribution, related to individual level of aggression and pronounced for male faces, might be one mechanism mediating physical violence.
SUBMITTER: Wegrzyn M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5429544 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Wegrzyn Martin M Westphal Sina S Kissler Johanna J
BMC psychology 20170512 1
<h4>Background</h4>Why is it that certain violent criminals repeatedly find themselves engaged in brawls? Many inmates report having felt provoked or threatened by their victims, which might be due to a tendency to ascribe malicious intentions when faced with ambiguous social signals, termed hostile attribution bias.<h4>Methods</h4>The present study presented morphed fear-anger faces to prison inmates with a history of violent crimes, a history of child sexual abuse, and to matched controls form ...[more]